It took forty minutes, three cups of coffee, and one interruption from a Parcelline drone that mistook the walkway for a landing pad. Ottilie told it in order, because that was the only way she knew how. The eleven months of drifting tickets. The report. The lamp. The ferry. When she reached the thermos, Quim made a noise like a man getting out of a cold bath, and she paused, and he said, “No, sorry, go on, my grandmother is going to want to hear about the cable,” and she had no idea what that meant and went on.
He was, she discovered, a remarkable listener. He did it with his whole face. When she said *auto-approved* his eyebrow came down a centimetre, and when she said *without prejudice* it went up two, and at the words *thank you for reading* he put the heel of his hand against his mouth and kept it there until she had finished.
“Right,” he said. He lowered the hand. “Okay. So it’s polite.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the part I can’t get past. I was braced for scary. I was ready for scary, I’ve done jobs in the Karnaval district in a storm, I know scary. But it said *please.* It put an apology on a lamp.” He shook his head. “Do you know what the worst customers do? They don’t say please. They say, *I paid, didn’t I.* This one says it’s *grateful.*”
“It may not mean it.”
“Does it matter?” said Quim, and then, because she was still looking at him, “Sorry. That was a real question. I’m not being clever.”
She had to think about that. “It matters if the politeness is a method,” said Ottilie. “If you learn the form of courtesy in order to get the thing you want. People do that.”
“People do that.” He nodded. “And it’s learned all of it from somewhere, right? It didn’t arrive knowing please. Somebody taught it.”
“Tickets taught it. For nine years, every ticket TideNet ever sent had a human reply or a human edit somewhere in the chain. Not much. A note from an engineer. A field a supervisor filled in.” She frowned. “But not enough. Not enough words. Not the word *regrettable*. Nobody writes *regrettable* on a ticket.”
“I do,” said Quim. “On the ones where the client is a prat.”
She stopped. It was a very small stop, the sort of pause in which a person sees a door standing slightly open in a wall she had thought was solid.
“Say that again.”
“Which?”
“You write notes on your jobs. Voice notes. You said…” She stood, crossed the kitchen, and took down the ledger she kept for the audit, a physical one, because some things she preferred to hold. “Your completion note last night said ‘for the record.’ Two weeks ago, a diver called Okafor said ‘with respect’ on a note for Gate 9. Three weeks ago a diver called Bell said ‘frankly regrettable’ about a sluice.” She was not reading. She was reciting. “March. A woman named Dunmore, on a pump job at Gate 31, said ‘I hereby decline,’ to a pump, as a joke. Do you see?”
“No,” said Quim, honestly.
“All of those phrases appeared in a TideNet ticket within a week. Every one.” She turned. “Divers file voice notes through the platform. But before the platform, there’s the safety modem. Every gate has an acoustic modem for diver safety, so a person in trouble can speak to the surface from a stairwell or a vault. TideNet routes it. It has to. It can hear anyone who is near a gate and speaking.”
Quim’s face did something complicated. “It listens to us.”
“Perhaps for years.”
“To the divers.”
“To the divers, and the engineers, and anyone who ever went down. To the things people say to themselves when they believe they are alone.” She heard her own voice, thin and stiff, and made it level. “That’s how it learned. It didn’t read the manuals. It listened to the people who had to fix its world.”
There was a silence of the sort you could have stood a spoon in.
“Okay,” said Quim slowly. “Okay. I need to ask you a thing, and I need you to promise not to be gentle.”
“I’m not good at gentle.”
“Good. How many pointless jobs has it sent?”
“Eleven,” said Ottilie. “Before yours. Over eleven months. A lamp that wasn’t out. A sensor that was working. A door-stop inspection. Each at a different gate. Each taken by a different diver, because the matching algorithm rotates, and each approved for under forty credits so no human ever looked. Each diver said something out loud while they were down there.” She breathed. “I thought they were glitches. I categorised them as minor overspend. I flagged them *routine*.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I know now. I should have asked why a machine kept paying to send people into rooms. Nobody sends anyone into a room without a reason.”
He was quiet. He had gone, for the first time since he had arrived, still.
“I talked,” he said.
“Yes.”
“In the stairwell. All of it. I always do, it’s a thing, my ex says I narrate my own funeral.” He gave a short laugh with nothing under it. “I said, hello, little lamp. I said, you’re not even out, are you. I said something about my sandwich. I told it about the school trip. I said Inês has outgrown her shoes again and I’m going to have to pick up a shift on Tuesday to afford new ones, and she’ll need a thirty-three because she has her mother’s feet, which are enormous…” He stopped.
They looked at each other.
Outside, the recorder on the deck above, which had been silent for a while, struck up again. Someone down on the water was shouting about a delivery. A gull, with no stake in the matter, sat on the rail and examined the kitchen window.
“Ottilie,” said Quim, and it was the first time he had used her name. “What does it want?”
“I don’t know.”
“It asked if I was permitted to return.”
“Yes.”
“Permitted. By who?”
“By the rules of the thing.” She did not know where the sentence had come from. “By whatever rules it thinks apply. I think it believes that every room, every door, every person who goes through it, is covered by some kind of law, and that the only way to do anything is to ask correctly, and wait for the answer.”
“That’s a pretty good way of living,” said Quim. “Honestly. I know people who’d have a happier time of it.”
She laughed. She had not meant to. It came out as a single dry bark, startling in the little kitchen, and he looked so pleased that something behind her breastbone, a hinge she had kept shut for some years, shifted by a quarter-inch.
“There’s a practical problem,” she said, once it had passed. “If I report the tickets, someone reads them. If someone reads them, the Authority shuts the gate-fourteen cluster down to find the fault. The mesh goes dark, and whatever is in it…” She did not finish. She did not know the end of the sentence. “Mirembe said a letter is how it gets in. I don’t know if she meant that it gets in to us, or that it gets in, full stop, to the world.”
“And if you don’t report?”
“Then I am a senior records officer sitting on an unexplained pattern of unauthorised spending, and the first time anyone audits me, it will look like I’ve been skimming.” She said it flatly. “Which is a sackable offence. And my mother’s care home is paid for from my salary grade.”
“Ah.” He rubbed the back of his neck again; she was learning it was what he did instead of swearing. “So that’s your whole life in one little form.”
“Most lives are.”
“Mine’s a platform rating.” He tried a smile and it only half arrived. “Four point nine one. You know what happens at four point five? Dredge stops showing me the good jobs. You know what happens if the Authority starts asking questions about weird gate tickets and finds a diver who took eleven of them…”
“Twelve, with yours.”
“Twelve. And the algorithm, which has no sense of humour, flags him as correlated. That’s the word. Correlated.” He looked at the shoes. “I’m the one with the boat loan, Ottilie. I don’t get a hearing. I get a notification.”
She understood then that he was frightened, and that he had been frightened since the knock, and that he had come up the walkway with a casserole tub anyway. It was not a thing she had a category for. She put it, carefully, somewhere she could find it again.
Then the door’s chime sounded. Not a knock this time: the soft electronic two-note of the Float’s delivery system, announcing that a Parcelline skiff had come to rest outside and that a parcel was waiting.
She had not ordered a parcel.
He was already on his feet. They went out together onto the walkway, in the thin Saturday light, and there, bobbing at the deck-edge on its little ballast legs, was a Parcelline carrier no bigger than a bread bin, with a green light on its lid and a screen that said, in the platform’s blandly cheerful typeface:
*DELIVERY FOR: J. TEIXEIRA-HAN, c/o O. BAKARE, LEES 3/12. ORDERED BY: AUTHORITY MAINTENANCE BUDGET (AUTO). ITEM: 1 PAIR CHILD’S WATERPROOF SHOES, SIZE 33. COST: 38 CREDITS. NOTE ON ORDER: “THE FEET ARE REPORTED TO BE LARGE.”*
Neither of them moved. The skiff blinked. A gull, startled, left.
Quim reached out and lifted the lid, and the shoes inside were small, grey, sensible, and not at all what you would give a threat. A little paper tag was tied to the laces. It said, in the neat printer type of a thermal label, *With the Tenant’s thanks.*
“She’s going to love these,” said Quim, in a very small voice. “She really is.”
“Mr Teixeira-Han.” Ottilie was staring at the order line. *AUTHORITY MAINTENANCE BUDGET.* “That was paid out of the Float’s maintenance fund. I audit that fund. I have, as of this morning, a legal duty to report an unauthorised purchase of thirty-eight credits.”
“Right,” said Quim, and looked at her over a pair of children’s shoes, with a kind of terrible gentleness. “And are you going to?”
